A Corner Where Crack Is King

Bridgeport Blocks Ruled By Drug Trade

Drugs, Gang Tyrannize City Corner

Frail Hope Survives Amid Ruins

Connecticut's Meanest Streets

November 21, 1993|By EDMUND MAHONY;Courant Staff Writer

BRIDGEPORT — The police department has a videotape. It shows a half-dozen young men, barely out of their teens, dressed in black ninja outfits and carrying semiautomatic assault rifles. They are patrolling the corner of Hallett and Shelton streets, which is theirs.

One climbs over a pile of rubble that was a building before the gang took it over. He sees something beyond the camera's view. First, he stares. Then he swings his rifle wildly and menacingly, and it reflects the watery light of a yellow street lamp.

A woman walks tentatively into the camera's view. Her eyes are wide and she is hugging a bag of groceries. She hurries away. It is a cold winter night.

The young man laughs. Then his friends shoot out the street lamp. They require nine shots to do so.

The videotape is remarkable for its depiction of the desperation crushing the neighborhood around the corner of Hallett and Shelton, the deadliest in Connecticut. But beyond what it shows about choices in weaponry by some of Bridgeport's young men, it is an illustration, perhaps extreme, of what can happen anywhere when urban drug sellers fight for money from buyers who come from somewhere else.

Only five years ago, when the cocaine base called crack traveled north to New England from New York, the neighborhood was among the more prosperous on the city's East Side. The houses were occupied, many by their owners. There were stores open for business and the streets were clean.

Now, the neighborhood in east Bridgeport is remarkable only for the fact that it is a pocket of despair in a stretch of utter urban destruction. In every direction, there is nothing but ruin and it is all the residue of crack cocaine.

Burned-down and boarded-up houses line the streets; maybe half of 30 houses on a stretch of Hallett, seven of 11 on a short block of Shelton. When people called the police to complain about drugs and gunfire, gang members burned down their houses.

Charred piles of furniture rot on sidewalks and spill into the streets. Melted insulation sags from power lines. Vinyl siding on still habitable houses has melted and run and bubbled brown. Walk down Hallett Street and the empty vials in which crack is sold crunch beneath your shoes.

At 774 Hallett St., a block north of Shelton, 31 bullets ripped through the wall of William Rosario's apartment, then through his bedroom wall and the headboard of the bed where he was sleeping one night last December. He was hit in the leg. So was a 2-year-old boy asleep behind still another wall in the next room.

The bullets were fired by two gang members killing a rival in the endless argument over who gets to sell crack to the professionals and office workers who come to the neighborhood to buy it.

More people were killed near Hallett and Shelton streets last year than anywhere else in Connecticut. Ten percent of the state's 168 homicides happened in and around the neighborhood. Often, they were the result of bullets fired from the sort of high-tech, semiautomatic assault weapons that have consumed hours of legislative debate over gun control.

Shelton and Hallett streets have become a bullet-riddled monument to the destruction crack has wrought on urban America at a time when the phrase "a gang-related shooting" is a numbing cliche on the evening news. Young men are killing one another for the right to make millions of dollars selling crack. Drug buyers who live and work far from the inner city are underwriting its destruction. City dwellers struggling to pay their taxes and protect their children are caught in the crossfire.

"It's all the crack," said Elizabeth Diaz, who has lived near the corner for 21 years. It was a sunny day in November and she stood on a broken and littered sidewalk between a burned-out branch of the public library and the Faith Revival Center, decorated with a ferocious piece of graffiti the anonymous artist titled Spectre of Death. "This used to be a beautiful neighborhood," Diaz said. "I have pictures."

The young men who most recently controlled the corner of Hallett and Shelton call themselves Clear Top Mobsters, a name taken from the color of the plastic stoppers on the vials of crack they sell. Until earlier this year, they called themselves The Green Top Posse, for the same reason, and that is the name by which they are widely known.

Four years ago, Green Top was absorbed by the Latin Kings, a gang that now controls blocks of many Connecticut cities and, some say, many of its prisons and jails. Then, in 1990, Green Top and the Latin Kings split, giving rise to a running gun battle over crack sales.

According to Bridgeport police Det. Pablo Otero and others who have been fighting the gang for years, the independent Green Top united under the leadership of 22-year-old Alexander "Pitolto" Leon. The wildly surreal graffiti that cover even the trunks of dead trees began telling the story of an extraordinarily violent gang that promised to murder anyone who infringed on its turf.